Google drops alarm requirement for Pixel Adaptive Charging

Google recently rolled out some improvements to Pixel phones’ Adaptive Charging feature, and now it seems it no longer requires an alarm.

Adaptive Charging, for those unfamiliar with the feature, helps preserve the health of your phone’s battery by delaying when it hits 100 percent charge when you leave it charging overnight. In its initial implementation, Adaptive Charging held phones at about 80 percent and would finish charging to 100 percent based on users’ morning alarm.

This is a pretty significant difference between Adaptive Charging and iPhone’s ‘Optimized Battery Charging,’ which also delays when an iPhone hits 100 percent charge but bases it on learning the owner’s routine.

As detailed by 9to5Google, Adaptive Charging gained a new status notification to indicate when the feature is active. Moreover, the notification includes a button to turn it off once.

New Adaptive Charging notification | Image credit: 9to5Google

However, it seems that update also removed the alarm requirement. 9to5 notes that the Adaptive Charging description changes from “Uses alarm to completely charge by wake-up” to “Activated based on your cycle.” I was able to confirm the description is different on my Pixel 7 as well (see the header image). You can find the setting by heading into Settings > Battery > Adaptive preferences.

Despite the change on devices, at the time of writing, Google’s support documentation still listed alarms as a requirement for Adaptive Charging. In other words, it seems someone might have jumped the gun and pushed the change out before Google got its documentation in order.

Anyway, the updated Adaptive Charging should work better for people now. Some found the old alarm requirement restrictive, especially at launch when Google arbitrarily restricted the feature to alarms set between 5am and 10am.

Source: 9to5Google